The advantages of Usenet’s quoting conventions

This is the text of an article I posted to the newsgroup
uk.religion.christian
in early 2000, in response to someone who disliked the usual
conventions of Usenet quotation. It’s rather rambling, but
might be of some interest to someone ...

Philip Saunders dislikes the standard Usenet quoting conventions;
he prefers to put what he has to say at the start of his articles
and then quote the article he’s replying to, in toto and without
further comments. He says:

> IMO it would be simpler and easier to follow a thread if you could read
> what is new first, rather than have to run through a snipped and
> therefore dubious history of the arguments every time.

That’s a plausible opinion, but I think it’s wrong. This article
is an attempt to explain why.

It’s quite long, so here’s an executive summary.

The standard convention fits better with the
conversational tone of the medium.

The standard convention results in articles
that are more coherent and easier to read,
because it keeps topics together.

The standard convention does a better job of
reminding readers of context when they need to
be reminded of it.

The standard convention is standard, and people
are used to it; a non-standard convention has to
be quite a lot better if its advantages are to
outweigh the advantage of familiarity.

That doesn’t mean that the standard convention
is always best. but it’s usually best, and
breaking with it needs a better reason than "I
happen to prefer it some other way".

Numbers in the right margin indicate stuff relevant to
these five points. [Actually, I forgot to put them in.
-- gjm]

To begin at the beginning ...

Usenet is a funny medium. It’s rather conversational, but it’s
not like an ordinary conversation because, whereas in an ordinary
conversation each person usually speaks briefly and then yields
the floor to someone else, in Usenet it’s usual for each article
to have much more content in it. (Conversations in which each
person gets in several paragraphs before the next speaks are
pretty rare.)

But, although Usenet articles are much longer than typical
conversational utterances, they’re usually not at all like
essays or newspaper articles or monographs. As I said before,
Usenet is a conversational medium; the "turnaround time" is
much shorter than that in any printed medium, and the level
of formality is much lower.

In a spoken conversation, everything happens rather quickly.
A says something brief, B replies, C butts in, and so on,
It’s not hard to keep track of what’s being said. Well, not
very hard. Conversations have a way of losing their way,
and when the subject is difficult or there are a lot of
people involved it can be hard to follow what’s going on.

Usenet discussions are harder to follow than spoken
conversations. They can involve a lot more people. They
extend over longer time-scales, so that when C is replying
to B, A’s earlier words probably aren’t clear in his memory.
And there are lots of them going on at once. uk.r.c gets
a couple of hundred articles every day. Oh, and because
the articles are relatively long, the point you want to
reply to may be submerged somewhere in the middle of the
text.

There’s another problem, which is less serious in uk.r.c
than in many newsgroups (for technical reasons that I shan’t
go into): when you’re reading an article, you don’t
necessarily have its predecessors available. They might
have expired from your news server. They might not have
arrived yet. Even if the predecessors are available, most
newsreading software makes it fiddly -- not impossible,
but fiddly -- to have your nascent reply, and the thing
it’s a reply to, and a bunch of other articles, all
visible at once. Therefore, each article needs to contain
enough context that a reader can tell what’s going on
in it without needing to trawl through lots of past articles.

OK, that’s enough background. We need a way of replying to
articles that (1) provides enough context that readers
don’t have to work too hard, and (2) fits well with the
informal, sort-of-conversational tone of the medium.

There are two ways to provide context. You can quote, or
you can summarise. (Of course, these aren’t mutually
exclusive.) Summarising is hard to do well, and if it’s
done badly then it can cause a lot of grief. Quoting is
easy to do reasonably well. It’s also well supported by
the tools we use: all news-reading software has some
facilities for quoting the article you’re replying to.
Therefore, quoting is the best general solution. (Those
who are good with language and able to be impartial can
summarise instead when it’s appropriate to do so.)

You can try to reply to individual points one by one,
as is usually done, or you can try to reply to the whole
of an article. Replying point by point is much more
conversational; it makes the discussion much more like
a face-to-face discussion between friends or colleagues.
Replying to the article as a whole produces an atmosphere
more like that of an academic journal ("In a previous
article, Professor X argued that pseudomorphic maps are
a good tool for the study of comparative epistemology.
The purpose of this article is to suggest that actually
hypermorphic maps are a better tool"). It may be worth
mentioning that even in academic articles, block quotation
from earlier articles is common.

The usual convention also results in individual topics being
kept together. Suppose a group of articles deal with topics
A, B, C and D; then the usual Usenet quoting techniques produce
something like this

> > A1
> A2
A3
> > B1
> B2
B3
> > C1
> C2
C3
> > D1
> D2
D3

whereas if everyone treats the article they’re replying to
as an individual whole we’ll get

A3
B3
C3
> A2
> B2
> C2
> > A1
> > B1
> > C1

(or the reverse) which may look more elegant but splits
each topic into fragments, making it harder to follow
the thread of the discussion.

But, Philip claimed, it’s best to see what’s new first.
Not so, in my opinion. As I’ve already said, context is
of vital importance. Readers cannot be expected to remember
everything that’s gone before, and they need to know what’s
gone before if they’re to see the point of the new stuff.
(This isn’t always true, but I think it’s true in most
discussions in uk.r.c .) That suggests that the context
should come before the new material.

The importance of context provides a reason for replying
point by point, too. If I write an article (say) 40 lines
long, and you reply to everything I’ve said in it but
don’t match up your new material with the text in my
article to which it’s replying, then the new reader has
to work that much harder to see why what you’ve said is
relevant. (Or, if they start from what I’ve written, to
see what you’ve said in reply to each thing I’ve said.)

My final argument in favour of the standard conventions
is a rather obvious one. They’re standard. This isn’t
a defence of mere conventionalism; the point is that
people get used to things, and work better with what
they’re familiar with. There’s nothing fundamentally
better about reading from the top of a page to the
bottom instead of the other way around, but I bet you
find the following paragraph harder to read than this
one.

one.
found the previous paragraph easier to read than this
bottom instead of the other way around, but I bet you
better about reading from the top of a page to the
they’re familiar with. There’s nothing fundamentally
people get used to things, and work better with what
a defence of mere conventionalism; the point is that
is a rather obvious one. They’re standard. This isn’t
My final argument in favour of the standard conventions

In the same way, readers of Usenet newsgroups have
generally become familiar with the conventions of the
medium, and know how to work with them. Different
conventions will make them work harder and feel less
comfortable. If you’re going to do that, there had better
be a good reason.

Other approaches have advantages. Giving no context
at all saves disc space and network traffic; there are
situations in which it’s appropriate, but Usenet isn’t
one of them. Summarising and then replying to the whole
article might be best when your issues aren’t with
individual things someone has said but with some broader
idea or ideas. Point-by-point replies can encourage
argumentativeness, and they look less tidy on the
page.

But, most of the time, these advantages aren’t enough
to justify abandoning the replying conventions that have
established themselves as the standard. Those standard
conventions work well, and they should only be broken
when you have a good, solid reason why they will not do.

It probably hasn’t escaped your notice that this very
article defies the conventions it’s arguing for; it contains
little context, summarises as well as quoting, and isn’t
do anything like a point-by-point answer to anything.
That’s because this is itself very different from most
Usenet articles. It is deliberately more expository than
conversational; it’s fairly formal in tone; it’s trying
to provide fairly complete coverage of an issue that’s
been only vaguely addressed before.

So I think the style of this article is appropriate. But
the style has its dangers. I bet a lot of people will
skip straight over it because it’s too long. (The
separator lines and the executive summary are attempts
to make its length less of a problem.) And, frankly, it’s
a lot less fun to read than many articles in uk.r.c .
In other words, even when a different posting style has
a lot going for it, it’s marginal. Be warned.

This has been a public service announcement. Thank you
for listening. Er, reading. If you ignored everything else
here and just skipped to the last paragraph, too bad.